In recent years, the use of touch-screens in consumer electronic devices, such as smart phones and tablet computers, has greatly increased. One limitation of older touch-screen technologies is that a user's engagement with the touch-screen must involve direct contact between the user (e.g., the user's finger/s) and a surface of the touch-screen. Recently, touch-screen controllers have become available that allow a ‘high-sensitivity’ mode that can enable a user's engagement with the touch-screen to be registered through a material or fabric, such as a glove. However, such controllers must be manually toggled between ‘high-sensitivity’ modes (e.g., for gloved operation) and ‘low-sensitivity’ modes (e.g., for ungloved operation). The manual nature by which the touch-screen controller must be toggled is detrimental to the user experience because it requires that a user first remove his/her glove to place the screen in a ‘high-sensitivity mode.’ Furthermore, power consumption of the controller and/or host device is generally greater when a touch-screen is placed in a ‘high-sensitivity’ mode, thus, if the user should forget to re-enter the ‘low-sensitivity’ mode, for example if gloved operation is no longer desired, the battery life of the host device may be adversely affected.
Hence a need exists for a way to determine a suitable sensitivity mode, and to automatically select a sensitivity mode based on an optimal sensitivity setting, without the need for a manual user selection.